"Betrayal doesn’t always scream; sometimes it just whispers while smiling back at you..."
BACK TO DARK
A true story distilled in silence and disbelief.
When I came back to France after fifteen years in Switzerland, I thought I was returning home. I had learned the art of perfumery, but more than that, I had learned to trust my instincts and I ha launched Jousset Parfums. My wife and I opened a small company, a place for rising perfume brands trying to climb from small to less small. I asked my best friend, the one person I trusted for twenty-one years to join us. We began with light. Real joy. The illusion that shared dreams are stronger than everything.
For a moment, it worked. He came into our world, and I finally felt I could step away from the noise, the industry, the endless pretending. I could create again. The Unleashed Apothecary was alive, wild, and pure.
Then, little by little, the light started to flicker.
The joy became noise, the trust became tension. Production collapsed, clients disappeared because of our mishandling, and my wife was left to carry the weight while I watched everything we built start to drown. I closed The Unleashed Apothecary to help her, thinking it was temporary. It wasn’t.
What followed wasn’t rage. It was disbelief, the cold kind that silences you. I tried to stay human, to remind him that beyond the strategy, beyond the business, we were still friends. But every move he made pulled me further into the realization that friendship means nothing when pride takes the wheel.
The hardest part wasn’t his betrayal. It was the reflection in my own mirror: wondering if I had become the bad one, the villain of my own story. It took time to understand that what he did wasn’t my failure, but his weakness. A human disappointment dressed as ambition. He took advantage of my clear heart, mistaking it for naïveté.
When he left, I offered him the company, the staff, a clean path forward. But vanity never walks alone. He built another company under another name, tried to claim what wasn’t his, even reached out to my team, to my partners behind my back. I didn’t fight. I didn’t need to. Some battles aren’t worth the mud.
He avoided me, maybe out of guilt, maybe out of fear. And I told myself: We are both the result of humankind, but I choose virtue instead of vice.
I could have gone to war, raised an army of paid, well-pressed suits to steamroll him under legalese. Instead, I did what I do best: I turned the pain into creation. I poured the disbelief, the solitude, the silent pain into a bottle. I didn’t need revenge. I needed release. I create more when I have less.
Because darkness doesn’t destroy me. It feeds me. The Unleashed Apothecary is back.